Scholarship and technical training abroad gave Manansala more opportunities to hone his artistic skills and meet more influential, progressive mentors and artists. Among the grants he received was the Smith-Mundt-Specialist Grant which gave him the opportunity to study stained-glass making in New York. He created a few series of stained-glass works in which he skillfully achieved the leaded, “cloison effect” as seen in this 1960 piece, Carabao. Manansala depicted a time-honored subject, the carabao, which appears often in his genre paintings. This is one of his works created in the artistic phase characterized by a vibrancy of color and stronger assertiveness of surface. Highly imaginative with a quality of enveloping aura, the basic evocative lines and shapes define the face in Manansala’s distinct Cubist flair.